Texture development in Ti/Al filament wires produced by accumulative swaging and bundling

Abstract

Mechanical properties of ultra-fine grained materials are interesting for advanced engineering applications. For producing ultra-fine grained microstructures, various top-down processes of severe plastic deformation like equal channel angular pressing, high pressure torsion and accumulative roll bonding are available. The evolution of texture with respect to deformation by an alternative severe plastic deformation process, called accumulative swaging and bundling, is shown for ultra-fine grained Ti/Al composite wires, suitable for structural applications because of their high specific strength. In this cyclic process, an aluminium rod is inserted into a titanium tube before being swaged with an areal reduction of 20% per pass to a true strain of 4.3. After cleaning and cutting the resulting composite wire into 37 pieces, these are stacked in hexagonal arrangement into another Ti tube of the initial dimension before deformation is continued.The local texture gradient of the accumulative swaging and bundling composites was studied using a X-ray microdiffraction system based on a D8 Discover (Bruker AXS GmbH) equipped with a microfocus X-ray tube Iμ S and an area detector VÅNTEC-2000. The results are discussed with respect to the grain refining deformation process starting from the initial texture measured by synchrotron and neutron diffraction, respectively.The local Al and Ti texture evolution is related to the deformation mode, which is similar to extrusion. As such, an Al〈111〉+〈100〉-double fibre and a Ti〈101¯0〉-fibre emerge as the main texture components, each revealing gradients related to the deformation process. In particular, the local Al texture – being a function of both radial measurement position and deformation stage – can be correlated to material and process related issues like plastic flow and the superposition effect due to encapsulated filaments, respectively.